Editing "Harvest Red" - Partial Success?

[tofof 10]

Summary:

After inserting a radio trigger into the single-player campaign, no ability to use it in campaign mode, even though it works from the editor.

Explanation:

What I'm trying to do is remarkably straightforward - be able to slow time to fractions of 1x as well as speed it up in the single player campaign.

I was able to do this easily in a test mission with a radio trigger. I created a blank chernarus mission, put my trigger into it, and saved.

I used pboview to extract the campaign from missions.pbo, and had placed all 16ish missions into the editing folder (...My Documents\Arma 2\Missions), which let me load them. I used the 'merge' feature on each mission file (not the utes one) to quickly add my trigger to it without having to recreate the trigger.

I previewed several of the missions after merging and saving, and it worked like a charm. I could use the radio from the '0' menu or in the map screen to slow time, and could reset it with the normal time acceleration keys.

Problem:

I moved the edited and saved missions (saved with the default option in the editor, which saves the files to My Documents\Arma 2\Missions, not the 'single player' version which makes a new copy elsewhere) back to where they'd come from - the folder with the contents of missions.pbo. I made a backup of missions.pbo and deleted the original, and then used pboview to repack the modified folder, and verified that the new file was named and placed correctly.

All of that seemed to be successful - so I went in and played the single player campaign, and found to my dismay that the radio commands wouldn't work. The radio option in the '0' menu was still grayed out. The draggable radio that appears in the map screen wasn't there either. The 'radio' item was of course in my gear.

This was the case in the missions I've tried, which are up to and including the mission entitled, confusingly, harvest red - where you first are in command of the squad and have to rescue a team from a sniper.

Edited July 25, 2009 by tofof
better title

[tofof 10]

Solutions attempted:

Adding 'showRadio true;' to the initJIPcompatible.sqf files for the missions (like the already-present 'showGPS true' in them.), repacking etc. Also tried this in init.sqf.

Deleting missions.pbo.bi.bisign - the file that appears along with every .pbo in the c:\progfiles\bis\arma2\addons\ folder - no effect. From the 'sign' name and size (a few hundred bytes), I had wondered if this was some sort of verification hash. Game proceeds normally even though this file isn't present.

Adding the merged mission to the missions.pbo folder in the appropriate location (alongside the C1_IntoTheStorm.Chernarus ..etc folders), repacking etc.

So, any thoughts? It's baffling, to me, that my technique works fine in 'preview' and works if I export the mission to singleplayer, but if I repack it and try to use it in the actual campaign, it fails.

[kylania 568]

Just use the editor to save your single player missions. Click SAVE -> Export to Single Player Missions.

No need to use 3rd party PBO tools for that.

[tofof 10]

Yes, as I believe I said, I've done that and it works fine. That's what puzzles me, in fact.

The reason that's not a solution - it's not 'my' mission, it's the campaign. It's my understanding that there are some things that are tracked across multiple missions ('evidence' etc) and impact the outcome. I know just from poking around in the campaign files (description.ext) that there's branching based on what ending you receive in the given mission. Treating it as a single mission would break both of those.

Basically it just comes down to this - I have a radio if I preview or export each mission. Where does it go when I repack them for campaign mode?

[PorkyJack 10]

Where do I find the mission .pbos or sqms?

[IndeedPete 1038]

In your arma\addOns folder.

[PorkyJack 10]

Thanks mate, under which name? missions.pbo?

[IndeedPete 1038]

Yes. Missions.pbo\campaign